Three things to consider about nuclear power

It is interesting that President Barack Obama would unveil his plan for the future expansion of the nuclear power industry yesterday, precisely when it seems the worm has turned for the Vermont Yankee plant. The unfolding revelations about tritium popping up in monitoring wells and pipe systems that weren’t reported to regulators all makes it very uncertain the plant will get a permit extension for another 20 years past when the current one expires in 2012. So while the national debate is jumping ahead, there remains this undigested piece of incomplete business. And it is just one of several.

The role of nuclear power is a complicated issue, and one people tend to be passionately myopic about. To supporters, it is a clean, carbon-free source of massive amounts of energy. To opponents, it is a dangerous, expensive boondoggle. Both sides are right. I know, because I spent several years working as a reporter covering national energy policy for an industry newsletter in Washington, and nuclear was a big part of my beat. (In fact, probably the biggest “scoop” of my career came in the first few weeks of the Bush administration, when I got a nuclear lobbyist on the record as saying they expected new nuclear plants would be built in a few years. Keep in mind from Three Mile Island up until then, you couldn’t have said something like that with a straight face. It was only when the Bush administration arrived, with its posse of old energy business bigwigs, that they found the confidence to go on the offensive).

There were three key things that I spent a ton of time writing about, which I don’t think a lot of people realize but are key to the debate. I want to mention them as things to keep in mind, and I’ll try to do so in an evenhanded way.

For starters, it is undeniable that nuclear produces a lot of power with very little fuel. It is certainly not a renewable source — getting the uranium out of the ground and processed is a major industrial operation, which is hardly carbon-neutral. But the power generation itself releases little more than warm water, and does not involve removing the tops of mountains or trading with sometimes unfriendly nations. It uses so little fuel that almost all the fuel ever used in the 31 years that the Yankee Atomic plant in Rowe, Massachusetts, is still being stored on site, 18 years after the plant closed. That said… almost all the fuel ever used in the 31 years that the Yankee Atomic plant is still being stored on site, 18 years after the plant closed! The 266,000 pounds of waste sit in 15 concrete casks, under round the clock guard paid for by New England electricity ratepayers.

Which brings us to the first of three points: 1) Yucca Mountain. You’ve certainly heard of it, but may not realize what a hot topic of study, reporting, debate, and controversy it has been. In short, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 requires that the federal government take possession of spent nuclear fuel, and put it somewhere safe. The government began to circle around the idea of placing it under a mountain near Las Vegas at a place called Yucca Mountain in 1987. Of course, Nevadans freaked out, serious questions kept popping up about the safety of the site, and legal back and forth held everything up. The idea has been definitely abandoned now, and there is nothing else in the pipeline. Which means there will be 15 concrete casks of waste sitting in a field in Rowe for… who knows?

The second point is a company, 2) USEC. The only uranium fuel enrichment facility in the country, which produces most of the fuel used in American reactors, is run by the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, which was a federal agency until 1992. It was fully privatized, and is now just a regular publicly traded company. (it is also worth noting that the raw material, uranium, is subject to market price fluctuations like any other fuel). I wrote about USEC often when it was in the process of consolidating its operations at its plant in Paducah, Kentucky, in 2001. But since then but has held out the possibility of resuming some operations for a new centrifuge processing plant at a plant in Piketon, Ohio, where it is a major source of jobs in a struggling part of the state. House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio is a big fan, and recently applauded a $45 million grant to the company for research and development. ” This funding will allow USEC to continue its work on a project that promises to create thousands of new Ohio jobs and play a key role in the production of safe, affordable, emissions-free energy,” Boehner said. Truly, one man’s pork is another man’s critical job creation program.

The last thing is 3) the Price Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, one of the most astonishing pieces of legislation you’ll ever hear about. The thinking behind this is that the odds of a major nuclear catastrophe are very small, but the potential impact of one is so great, that it is impossible to insure for it. So, in comes the federal government. Try to imagine if Three Mile Island had been as bad as Chernobyl: imagine the lawsuits, the damages, the vast tracts of central Pennsylvania made completely uninhabitable. The way the law works is that nuclear owners pay for their own insurance up to $10 billion, but the federal taxpayer is on the hook for everything beyond that. The industry says this is just a sensible, absolute emergency measure. Opponents call it corporate welfare.

What I’m trying to say here is that there are a lot of unanswered questions about nuclear power, and that we should proceed carefully. And that we should acknowledge that this is not a case of private business being allowed to do or not do something: the federal government and taxpayers are already neck-deep into this.